‘A Stereoscopic video’ means a moving picture that is produced by receiving and outputting left-eye data and right-eye data alternately to give three-dimensional far and near distance effect to two-dimensional planes.
Along with the recent development of the Internet, diverse multimedia data in a field of education, culture, current issues and the like are provided to Internet users. Internet users can watch and/or listen to multimedia data they want at any time at any place as long as they have clients connected to the Internet.
Generally, Internet broadcasting systems, which are also referred to as Internet broadcasting systems, are formed of an encoding server for encoding multimedia data based on a predetermined encoding method, a streaming server for transmitting the multimedia stream, and clients for decoding and outputting the transmitted multimedia stream.
FIG. 1 is a block diagram illustrating a typical Internet broadcasting system. As shown, video data and audio data are inputted from a video/audio input device 10, such as a video camera, and compressed as they pass through an encoding server 20.
The MPEG is a group of moving picture experts that is formed to establish the standards for moving picture encoding methods. The MPEG studies about moving picture compression that varies continuously based on time and about the transmission of coded data. The MPEG suggests international encoding standards and current Internet broadcasting is performed based on the standards. Particularly, MPEG-1 and MPEG 2 are international standards that are used for compressing and storing large volume multimedia data.
A streaming server 30 transmits the multimedia stream, which is encoded by the encoding server 20, to clients 50 through the Internet 40. Then, the clients 50 decode the transmitted multimedia stream. The clients 50 should have a player with a codec to output the multimedia data.
In the meantime, some problems may occur when the stereoscopic video data are transmitted using conventional encoding methods and current Internet broadcasting system. Since left-eye images and right-eye images should be encoded separately to transmit stereoscopic video data to the clients through the Internet, the amount of data is increased more than twice and the probability of transmission error becomes higher due to the load of transmission traffic. Moreover, there is a problem that the clients should discriminate between the left-eye images and the right-eye images in order to decode them and output them synchronized with each other temporally. If the left-eye images and the right-eye images are not outputted alternately, a three-dimensional effect cannot be obtained, only to cause eye-fatigue of viewers.
Therefore, a new encoding method, other than conventional encoding methods, is required to broadcast stereoscopic video data on the Internet as well as an Internet broadcasting system and method coinciding with the encoding method.